Flak Magazine: Review of Lucie Aubrac, 9-28-99

Being in the French Resistance is totally rad! You get a cool code name, super secret missions (like blowing up trains!) and guns! But look out: the Nazis (including the super sexy Nazi stenographer Helga) are out to catch you and your friends, and they're mean. If you're in the French Resistance and you're caught, you could get put in a jail cell...with cockroaches! Gross! But don't worry — your beautiful friends and handsome wife will come and bust you out of jail in a scene so awesome that it's reminiscent of the pod racing sequence in The Phantom Menace.

Right. Lucie Aubrac. It's a French film, about the French Resistance, and even to a non-historian, there are bits and pieces that don't feel entirely right. Claude Berri's latest effort (he also gave us Germinal and Jean de Florette) is polished to the point of absurdity; in Berri's world, every French Resistance fighter (except a couple of professorial-looking old guys) is a handsome, anthropology-grad-student looking French hunk with a serious attitude and very little in the way of back story or personality.

(To be fair to the writers, there's also an earnest fat guy, who also lacks personality and personal history.)

The film's plot is pretty straightforward: Raymond Samuel (Daniel Auteuil) is a medium-level figure in the Resistance who gets caught, leaving his very attractive and steely wife Lucie (Carole Bouquet) the job of somehow bailing his butt out of jail. There are a few twists beyond that, but none worth mentioning; the emotional center of the film is limited and well defined.

While the film is visually impressive and flows smoothly, the plot and action feel oddly...Hollywood. But without the self-mocking, sarcastic Hollywood-style wisecracks that can (sometimes) bring a stock film up into the realm of entertaining, this pompous, polished product quickly grows dull. There are certainly times when the film skates on the thin ice of entertainment — the allusion to political strife within the Resistance is intriguing, but it's never really followed up. When the Resistance gets together, you don't see people being rent apart by internal dissention; instead, everyone is uniformly solemn and united.

Impressive? Yes. Hurrah for the French. Admirable? Oh my, yes. Believable? Not really. Dull? Absolutely.

Then there's the character of Klaus "The Butcher of Lyon" Barbie, the Nazi police chief famed for his cruelty and the generally not-so-nice way he interacted with French people. Some movies might dig around in his history and give him some sort of marginally human character hook, so we could try and wrestle with his evil personality.

Not Lucie Aubrac. Aubrac's Barbie is, if you can believe it, a big Aryan mean guy who kicks heroic people with hard boots, whips them a lot, yells at them, and then puts his hand on his stenographer's bare thigh. Nuanced? Not really. Historically accurate? Maybe, but certainly not exhaustively so. As the film's introduction states, "some liberties were taken for dramatic purposes." Mm. And while there's a token effort to show that Not All Nazis Are Bad Guys by introducing an earnest Gestapo lieutenant with a heart of gold, it feels a bit artificial. Like pretty much everything else in this film.

Which is not to say that I wouldn't collect the Burger King cup with Klependorff, the Lovable Gestapo Lieutenant on it. Because I'd actually make a special effort to do so, if it were ever produced.

Lucie Aubrac is based on a true story, and it was probably all very inspiring and dramatic in real life. As a movie, however, it's pretty dull. If you include Lucie along with the underwhelming Those Who Love Me Will Take the Train, the French aren't exactly cleaning up at the cineplex this year.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)